Wednesday, January 31, 2018

A week ago, I was visiting my son in Los Angeles. When he headed out for an appointment one morning, I asked him to drop me off at the LA County Museum of Art.

I was looking forward to seeing the latest exhibitions so much that it didn't even occur to me that LACMA wouldn't be open yet at 9:30 in the morning.

I was momentarily disoriented when I realized I was going to be outside the gate for an hour and a half -- on the streets of Los Angeles! without a car! But then I took a deep breath . . . got my heartbeat back down . . . and started to explore.

Then a few things happened in rapid succession:

* I noticed a phenomenal "shutter" effect as I walked alongside the fence with the sun shining through -- light-dark-light-dark-light-dark.

* I took a picture and shared it with my daughter in Chicago. (When she can't come to the museum with me in person, she cheers me on virtually.) We "LOL'd" about the fact that I was so eager I came before the museum even opened.

* I decided to walk around the (extensive) perimeter of LACMA and take a bunch of pictures.

* I realized I was seeing a new side of LACMA. I was documenting my experience of being "outside looking in."

* I thought about doing an exhibition of my photographs (and video) -- on social media. I decided Instagram was the right place for it.

* I wondered if a hashtag could be used to tie together my "virtual exhibition." I decided to use #lacmaoutsidein.

In the last year I've become aware -- along with many observers of the tech scene and social media -- that Instagram has important lessons for us about how to communicate better. My #lacmaoutsidein experiment was conducted with no particular end in mind -- other than to have fun, discover something new, and perhaps make something beautiful. I did suspect that it might hold lessons for all kinds of communication, including very intentional activist efforts. And, indeed, the images and the way people interact with them in a "virtual exhibition" stimulated all kinds of unexpected thoughts for me.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Luke Butler, The End XXIII
Exhibited as part of Way Bay show at
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

A week ago, I was enjoying a beautiful drive through California's Central Valley, en route from Berkeley to Los Angeles. I had just dropped a family member at SFO, and so I had had a rare taste of Bay Area rush hour traffic in two directions. It reminded me of how overwhelming US car culture is.

I thought about the pessimism of a friend of mine -- an environmental engineer -- and I also thought about having heard a local pastor describe a pending building project as a "hundred year decision."

"Where are we headed -- really?" I wondered. "What would it mean to take a realistic 100-year perspective on what's likely to happen with the climate crisis?"

I spent a large part of that long drive thinking about it.

It occurred to me that there is analysis that one can learn from -- I had recently read about FEMA revising the flood plain projections for the New York City area, for instance -- and I promised myself that when I got home from my LA trip, I would look up some studies.

If I needed another nudge in that direction, I saw this the next day:

[T]he world’s diplomatic meanderings — from the ineffectual call in Toronto for a reduction in emissions to the summit meeting in Paris, where each country was allowed simply to pledge whatever it could to the global effort — suggest that the diplomats, policymakers and environmentalists trying to slow climate change still cannot cope with its unforgiving math. They are, instead, trying to ignore it. And that will definitely not work.

I am coming to realize that what Guantanamo says about the US goes very deep.

What's the underlying condition?

In the past year, I've dealt with a cancer diagnosis, and it's changed the way I look at things.

In June I went to the emergency room with a breathing problem that had been getting worse and worse for over a month. An X-ray quickly showed that I had a "pleural effusion" -- fluid accumulated in the lining of my lung. My left lung, itself, was like a deflated balloon, bunched up in the upper corner of the lung cavity, unable to expand because of the way the cavity wall was pressing up from below with all the fluid.

The quick fix was to drain the fluid. The doctor inserted a needle between the ribs in my back and drained away 3 liters of milky white stuff.

Voila! I could breathe again!

(Problem solved, right?)

And then they started taking more scans . . . .

Within a day, the ER doc dropped by to tell me: "It looks like you have lymphoma. It's a kind of cancer. It's treatable . . . but you've got to get on it."

It turned out the lymphoma I had, though low grade, had generated a troublesome mass in my abdomen. I had heavy-duty chemotherapy for the next few months. Things seem to be getting better, and I'm now on a course of lower-impact drugs.

Looking the other way

Now that I'm past the immediate shock of the cancer diagnosis, I have time to think. One of the things I wonder about is, "What if my cancer hadn't exhibited that lung problem? Maybe I would still be in the dark about the underlying condition . . . . "

I should mention that one of the things that was special about my case is that I had avoided all contact with a doctor for the past decade or so. Because, you know, I'm healthy!

In other words, I was not terribly interested in knowing what might be going on inside me.

Picking up on this detail, my doctors were perceptive enough to understand that they needed to start my treatment immediately, and not let me have a chance to slip out the door with the promise to deal with my condition "soon."

An unpleasant truth about US society

In the case of my cancer, I think my body helped with the process: it figured out a way to send me a message, one that I couldn't ignore.

For those willing to listen, Guantanamo is sending us a message. There is an underlying condition in this country, one that we are trying very hard to ignore.

It is up to each of us to search our hearts to see if we can figure out what it is that we really think is going on in this country.

For my part, I plan to dig deep . . . with a special eye for that which I feel afraid to admit. I suspect that the underlying condition is going to turn out to be pretty scary.

Monday, January 8, 2018

An end to "business as usual"?
(Anthony Eden and his cabinet in The Crown (Netflix))

I wonder if it has occurred to other people watching "The Crown" -- as it has occurred to me -- that the tailspin into which the UK was thrown by the Suez Crisis might be compared to what is happening to the US in the course of the crisis over North Korea and nuclear weapons.

Today I am sitting down to study the chronology of developments during the past year. But even before beginning, I'm aware of similarities:

* Before the Suez Crisis, it was just assumed that it was for the UK to decide the disposition of the canal. It never occurred to anyone that that particular piece of infrastructure might be controlled . . . by Egyptians!

* Before the Suez Crisis, it was just assumed that the UK could brandish its military might, and its allies would applaud it. UK leaders didn't expect the rest of the world to say, "What gives you the right?"

* Before the Suez Crisis, UK leaders (like Anthony Eden) never thought of leaders of other countries (like Gamal Abdel Nasser) as being entitled to stand up to them. That changed . . . .

The slow-boil crisis over North Korea and nuclear weapons is changing assumptions about how the US acts, and where it stands in relation to the other nations in the world.

As of today, there are 73 House members and 13 senators calling for restrictions on the ability of the US president to unilaterally call a nuclear first strike: